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Compare and contrast the approach to studying children’s friendships taken in the Bigelow and La Gaipa (1974) study with that taken by William Corsaro.

Friendship means different things to different people in different cultures. Friendship is also different from other kinds of relationship such as love, family and professional. The influential power on people’s behaviour, style, ideas and life is dominant and remarkable and therefore worthwhile for scientific investigation. This essay will compare and contrast the academic research of three dominant and pioneer scientists on the development psychology discipline and especially in the field of children’s expectations and children’s understanding of friendship. It will …show more content…

Corsaro used an ethnographic approach for his study. He become a member of each group that he was studying of over a period of time (from months to years) and he was carry out observations, detailed notes and video-recorders, at first outside the group and after a period (when he was becoming familiar and member to the group) inside the group. The explanations and the data derived from these studies were significant and very convincing, with a number of characteristics sufficiently identified and well presented from both of them. A common finding from both studies was that small children (3-5 years old) correlate friendships with the expectation of common or sharing play activities. Especially, proposed a three-stage model whereby at first stage children’s friendships expectations were based on shared activities, geographical closeness and parental support on friendships development. In second stage appeared to be a less individualistic friendship model and an emphasis on sharing, loyalty and commitment and on third stage expectations drawn on more intimate and confiding relationships, focalized by similarities in attitudes, values and common interests. In addition, to this three-stage model, 16 of the original 21 friendship expectations, on the researchers list, were appeared in the older children’s essays compared to their younger counterparts, which suggest that as children get older, relationships become more complex and sophisticated. Bigelow and La